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Song Sites Face Legal Crackdown

Posted by Zonk on from the how-dare-they-post-words-online dept.

CaptainPotato writes "According to the BBC, the Music Publishers' Association is stepping up to launch the next phase in the music industry's battle against online music. The MPA is demanding jail time for the maintainers of websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics. The MPA President has stated that closing websites and imposing fines is not enough, stating that by 'throw [ing]in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective' in its crusade." We just recently reported on the pearLyrics cease-and-desist order as well.

2 of 537 comments (clear)

  1. more betrayal by yagu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Jail time for unlicensed publishing of lyrics? I don't know how many times I've gone looking for lyrics to songs and the only place I can find anything is some web site where a fan has taken the time to put lyrics together. Maybe that's changed some and now that the music industry see dollar signs you really can go "buy" this stuff -- is it my responsibility to monitor and find this stuff (which, btw should have been available a long time ago)?

    The music industry has betrayed the consumers since forever. Are they going to go after the publicly available and free CDDB? Probably. But even that didn't exist until the consuming public put together the first application to make this available on-line. And guess who provided the data? The friggin' public, again. And, now that the industry sees dollar signs, they want to claim ownership.

  2. This does not make sense at all... by kandresen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There is supposed to be a good reason for putting people in jail, and this is not one of them.

    Ask yourself:

    1) are these people a risk for the society at large?
    2) what are we supposed to accomplish by putting them in jail?

    As to number one, the problem is more an etical issue - nobody dies, nobody get anything but possibly lower sales.

    As to number two, US is already country with highest % og people in jail, yet in no other industrialized country are there as many people shooting each other with gun - if jailtime worked, why are these number not going down? It is like, send these harmless schoolboy to learn how to become hardcore criminals in jail.

    Why not instead focus on rehabilitation? Set up a schedule where those caught are constraint in the area of the crime? What is worse, one year in prisson or one year without rights for using Internet? ;)

    Please stop sending people to hard core crime schools when not a danger to the society at large.